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Faster than the speed of light

I don't think anyone noticed, and if they did, they didn't say anything.

What I did was stick this site on a CDN.

What the blue blazes is a CDN, you ask?

I'm not really sure. By my understanding, it means there are copies of this humble little site scattered all around the world, so instead of seeing the site, you are actually seeing a copy which happens to be a lot closer to you than my little backwater here in the mountains. So for example, you nice people in Australia are probably seeing this site on a server in Sydney. Or Brisbane. Or Pyongyang. Or Calcutta. Or somewhere that is a bit closer to you than Wicklow.

What this is supposed to do of course is make the site a hell of a lot faster.

It's kind of difficult for me to see this site as a Chinese would see it without traveling to China, which I have no intentions of doing, so I have to rely on sites that do my testing for me. For example, a place called GTMetrix does a fancy analysis and gives me an AA Rating, up there with Google and Amazon but beating the shite out of Farcebook which only gets an FB [rather appropriately?]. I'm happy with that.

One little side effect that I wasn't expecting is that I get a shed load less spam. I don't know how they do that, but it's nearly worth the effort just to get rid of all those irritating fuckers with their Ugg Boots, fake watches and money making scams.

I have a graph in the engine room that shows the amount of spam coming in, and I took a picture of it a week or so ago –

My download speeds tend to be a little erratic and my server has just increased their speed approx 33% so must admit I hadn’t noticed in the past. But as you’ve asked I certainly noticed an improvement today. Previously your site had taken a little longer to download than average but I’ve always reckoned that the content made the extra few seconds worthwhile . Just noticed my name and email at bottom of page are now blank although I doubt that will be connected if you made changes a month ago .

"I’ve always reckoned that the content made the extra few seconds worthwhile" Aw stoppit!

I haven't made any changes since, apart from cleaning a load of crud out of the engine room that wasn't even being used. I have been too busy doing nothing. The name/email thing is a browser thing all right. I'm having a few problems myself – half the time the little editing buttons in the comments aren't loading, but that's my browser too.

Your site is slower today but that's because there's a strong wind picking up here so you could go off altogether. Happens frequently. Need to tighten the elastic this end.

Could you look at yourself by using a proxy, say Pyongyang or Outer Mongolia or even Phuket? Cheaper than the air fare too tha' knows but they can be a bit strange. I settled on Maidstone Kent, UK once for the VPN and everything came up in Arabic?! And I thought my geography was bad.

Listen, if Australia can get into Eurovision, Wicklow to the Netherlands is a piece of cake. In the interests of research I have just set my proxy to Bangladesh and your blog comes up faster than it does normally. And its in English. Edit: would you look at that! I’ve got the stars and stripes not the Bangladeshi flag. Is everything on the move? WTF???

To be honest, your site has never seemed noticeably slow to me, and doesn't appear to be noticeably faster now. My 24 Mbps connection usually gives me about 12 Mbps download, which although not particularly fast is not too bad, so maybe that makes a difference? I don't really understand all this stuff. I'm on the laptop in Patras at the mo, using my mobile phone as a wifi hotspot, and just did a speed test, and I'm getting 12.13 Mbps down and 0.93 Mbps up with it, so about the same as at home. Whatever, I've never considered your site to be slow.

You're bragging again….. I was doing a spot of child minding yesterday down in the daughter's house and did a wee speed test. 45.06Mb down and 19.43Mb up. As of a minute ago I'm getting 2.92 down and 2.1 up. Still, I suppose it's better than dial up?

No change here, but your site was always quite quick anyway. But the reduction in spam must be a real blessing for you, Gramps! Mind you, you'll miss out on those million-dollar diamond-importing opportunities from Nigeria, now!

To be honest I'm really not that bothered about spam on the site. It's mostly those fawning comments that try to flatter me into letting them past so they can a) promote their site and b) start loading the site with their advertisements once they've got in. You know the kind of shit – "Just came across your site and I find the information in it amazing! How do you do it?". I would be mildly flattered if I thought they meant a single word, which they don't.

The great thing about spam is that I can clear it out with one click without even reading it.

I had better move to South Africa so. Except that I probably wouldn't be able to lay my hands on a decent pint of stout or a pack of Condor pipe tobacco. I remember once getting a present of a pound [weight] of tobacco from there – it was lovely!